Of Beast and Beauty - Jay Stacey - Страница 66
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have the beginnings of my wall.
Unfortunately, beginnings are not the same as endings.
I’m not even close to an ending when I hear footsteps on the stairs.
Heavy steps, two pairs of boots, two men’s voices arguing in harsh whispers
as they circle around to the top of the tower. When they reach the last
stair, Junjie pauses, clearly surprised to see me and my half wall.
“What is this, Isra?” Junjie’s eyes are sad, but not nearly as sad as his
son’s.
“I tried to stop him,” Bo says from his place behind his father. “I
wanted you to have a few more hours.”
A few more hours. Then he means to do it, to help his father kill me.
“No,” I whisper, shaking my head. I can’t have failed, not when I’m so
close.
“This doesn’t have to be painful,” Junjie says, holding out his hand.
“You can still change your mind and make your death a meaningful gift to
your city.”
“It’s no gift. Not for you or Bo or anyone else.” I back away, my
trowel falling to the floor with a dull thud, smattering mortar across my
bare feet. “This city is built on evil. It has to end with me,” I say, voice rising
until it rings with desperation.
“You will give your blood, or we will take it,” Junjie says, as stern as
he’s been with me since I was a little girl. “This city will stand and prosper
and flourish for another seven hundred years. You know this is the way
things are done in Yuan.”
And the way they will always be done. Nothing I say now will change
that. Nothing I do will accomplish anything but putting off the inevitable.
Escape is impossible, but still, I turn and run. I skid into my room and slam
the door behind me, throwing the lock seconds before Junjie throws his
weight against the door.
I back away from the trembling wood, hands shaking at my sides.
I won’t let him take my death. It’s the only thing I have left, the only
thing that matters. My death will be mine. I will have my revenge against
this city and the monster beneath the ground so eager for my blood, and I
will finally, finally, finally be free of it all. Of life and fear and love and loss.
Free of my responsibilities. Free of my failures. Free of this love that’s been
nothing but another curse, another stone around my neck pulling me to the
depths of an ocean of pain so deep that I will never hit bottom.
I want to be free. Free.
“Isra! Open the door!” Junjie shouts.
“Free,” I say aloud.
I’ve always craved freedom more than anything else. Anything.
If even one citizen of the dome and one Monstrous can love the other
more than they love anything else …
If I’m brutally honest with myself, do I really love Gem more than
freedom? Have I ever loved anything more than that elusive, seductive
unknown? If I had the choice—Gem or freedom, even the freedom that will
come with death, when all my obligations have been honored and I’m free
to exit on my own terms—what would I choose?
Gem is strong and brave and clever and good, and he makes me feel
things I never dreamed I could feel, but he is also difficult and frustrating
and impatient and … overwhelming. His arms feel like home, but he
represents everything strange and uncertain and unknown. Loving him
means gathering up all of those things, and carrying them with me. Forever.
Love means being vulnerable and beholden. Love means embracing the
pain I’ve been holding apart from myself for all the months that I’ve waited
for him. It means taking that pain and claiming it and knowing it might not
be the last of the pain he’ll bring into my life.
Love is pain, and pain is the opposite of freedom, and freedom is all
I’ve ever wanted, but I’ve never really stopped to wonder why. Why do I
want my freedom so desperately? Why do I dream of the wind instead of
something solid or permanent that I can hold in my hands, my arms?
Maybe I … Maybe …
“Isra! Isra!” Junjie is still shouting loud enough to rattle the door, but
his cries seem muted, drowned out by the roar of the revelation taking
place inside me.
“I had nothing better,” I whisper. Back in the time before Gem, back
in the darkness, in my cage, in my narrow world with Death waiting with His
arms outstretched and only my father to help me prepare for the long walk
to greet Him, there was nothing better than the dream of having no ties to
bind me.
But Gem, with all his flaws and complications and high expectations,
is better. His love, his faith in me, his belief that I can be as strong and
brave as he is … The way he makes me feel and think and try harder than
I’ve ever tried …
All of it, all of him, is better than anything else. Anything at all.
I take a breath and let the pain and love and admiration and
everything I feel when I think of Gem fill me up, soak into my soul, break
my heart wide open. It hurts—so, so much—but it’s also a relief. It’s also
warm and peaceful and safe. Beautiful. This kind of love is weightless,
limitless.…
And almost exactly what I imagined freedom would feel like.
If only I’d known sooner. If only I could thank Gem for helping me
find the only thing I’ve ever wanted as much as I want him.
TWENTY-SIX
GEM
I’M too late. Yuan is falling before my eyes.
Cracks as wide across as my body snake up the surface of the dome.
Stones tumble from the wall walks, making skittering sounds beneath the
moaning of the buckling metal that once fused the glass to the rock.
Bizarrely shaped Smooth Skins unlike any I encountered during my
captivity, partial mutants that I assume are the Banished that Isra spoke of,
and a few starving animals stream away from the once-healthy city in a
seemingly endless ribbon across the desert. The last of them emerged from
the Desert Gate less than an hour ago.
Isra was not among them. But I didn’t expect her to be. There’s a
reason the city is crumbling to pieces. Isra is gone.
Not gone. Murdered, and the city along with her, while you walked
away. And stayed away, wallowing in your weakness. You might as well
have slit her throat that first night. You’re the reason she’s dead.
Add another name to—
I begin to hum beneath my breath one of the songs Isra taught me, a
complicated tune with as many ups and downs as the path over the
mountains that brought me back to Yuan from the wilds where I had lost
myself for months.
Singing drowns out the terrible thoughts. Sometimes I imagine I’m
singing to Herem, the son I held for the first time the day I lifted him onto
his funeral pyre. Sometimes I imagine Father singing along in the deep,
steady voice of my childhood, banishing from my memory the confused
whimpers of his last days.
By the time I returned, Father no longer knew me. He called me by
his brother’s name. He asked where our sisters were. He smiled and told
stories about his new mate, as if he were a young man and he and Mother
just married. He cried like a child, begging me to bring a light into the hut
because he was afraid of the dark.
He died in his sleep a week after I returned. I never got to say
good-bye to the man I remembered.
Gare blamed me for that, too. He blamed me for Father’s broken
mind. He blamed me for the twenty dead before I brought the food. He
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